Creating Our Own Stereotypes

 

In Oklahoma, we do things that sound like they come out of an SNL routine that was expressly designed to ridicule Okies. That is, we seem to want to create a stereotype of ourselves that fits the widely-held images. The events I am about to describe are all exactly what you would expect from benighted rednecks, and the odds against all of these things happening at once are huge. I can only conclude that rural Okies want to make themselves look stupid. They sound like they come straight out of a book by Billie Letts or out of Tracy Letts’s screenplay. Chance cannot explain this.

All of these news items were posted on May 22, 2020. All of them occurred in Rogers County, three of them in the same town (Inola). Remember that rural Oklahoma is the buckle of the Bible belt, exactly where you would expect people to behave in a religious, even if not sanctimonious, fashion.

• First, the pastor of the Cowboy Gatherin’ Church in Inola was arrested for raping and molesting three underage girls. That’s really the name of the church. It meets either outside, amidst cattle barriers, or under the tin roof of an auction barn.
• Second, there was a fatal stabbing at a rodeo.
• Third, a man sustained burns when he set fire to his estranged wife’s house.
• Fourth (this is the only one not in Inola; it was in the Oologah-Talala school district), a former special education teacher was arrested for having sex with one of the girls in his class.

These things all fit our stereotype: fundamentalist religion, illegal sex, cowboy culture including cowboy churches and rodeos, stabbings, deadly marital strife, and arson.

If I wrote these things—separately, or together—into a novel, an editor would rightly accuse me of creating stereotypes, and ask me to remove at least two or three of them. But in Oklahoma we feed our stereotypes, and that is why all four of these things appeared in the news on the same day.

One inescapable conclusion is that the prevalence of the Christian religion does not make people behave any better. Creationists like to claim that believing in evolution will make us behave like apes. But does fundamentalism make us behave better? Are evangelicals more moral? Remember they believe they have the Holy Spirit living within them to empower them to act righteously.

There is actually a tragedy in the making here. As René Dubos pointed out in So Human an Animal, humans individually and collectively have an almost unlimited capacity to adjust to circumstances, no matter how dismal. While this has helped us to survive and prosper in any and all circumstances, they create a tragedy today. He said, people are accustomed to being immersed in pollution and in the stress of modern life, and hardly notice that anything is wrong. In Oklahoma, the particular version of this that we have is that sexually corrupt preachers, stabbings, arson, and marital strife seem normal, something to be forgotten as soon as we hear it on the news. They have become as normal a part of Oklahoma culture as cowboys and rodeos. We will not solve these problems, because we hardly recognize them as problems. We are comfortable with keeping these problems with us forever.

A Science Utopia? "July 20, 2019" Visions of Arthur C. Clarke, part one.

In 1986, Arthur C. Clarke wrote a book entitled “July 20, 2019.” I think it is just the right time for us to take a look at this book.

Arthur C. Clarke (1917-2008) is best remembered as a science fiction writer (especially 2001, A Space Odyssey). One of the reasons that he was a great writer was that he thought seriously about the implications of technological developments. Many people foresaw the development of advanced computers, but Clarke invented the computer HAL that passed the intelligence threshold and took control of a space ship.

Though Clarke was insightful and honest about the unexpected problems that might result from technological advance, his 1986 book entitled July 20, 2019 was mostly technological optimism. I recently read this book, and took notes on it with a 50-year-old pencil on a 20-year-old sheet of scratch paper while propped up reading in a 30-year-old bed. This date is the fiftieth anniversary of the 1969 Neil Armstrong moonwalk.

When humans first walked on the moon, anything seemed possible. Among the people who felt this way was, apparently, Clarke, and he still felt that way in 1986. Now that July 20, 2019 has arrived, we can look at Clarke’s predictions and see how close he came.

As Clarke noted, “The future isn’t what it used to be.” Clarke’s predictions were much closer than such predictions would have been on July 20, 1969, and certainly better than predictions made in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such as Jules Verne’s Paris in the Twentieth Century (Paris au XX^e siècle). Of course, Clarke was a little off. I’m not criticizing him, but I think an examination of his predictions will teach us something interesting about life and the world.

Some of his predictions were clear extensions of 1986 technology.

• He knew videotapes would be replaced by a hard digital medium, which he called vidules.
• In 1986 there were already word processing systems, and Clarke foresaw programs that would tell you when what you wrote was wrong. This technology has come, to the extent that some of us find it annoying.
• He predicted that hospitals would be competing for patients; that laser surgery would be routine; and that there would be more women doctors. He foresaw more home medical tests, the results of which you could type into a computer, which would send them to your doctor.
• Clarke foresaw roboticized homes: homes with robot vacuum cleaners, homes that could detect your mood and make automatic adjustments in temperature or even play the most appropriate background music. “The house of 2019 will take care of its owner’s every need.”
• Clarke foresaw the end of metallic cars.
• Clarke described international space stations—numerous, not just one.

As you can see, he was not too far off on the above predictions.

In addressing entertainment, Clarke said that the future would be fun. He did not perhaps foresee YouTube and blogs, but he said computers would allow individuals to create and publicize their own work. The only thing about which he was wrong was that he predicted television programs would dub the viewers’ faces into the actors’ bodies.

Most of Clarke’s predictions sounded unbelievable when he made them but were within the realm of the possible.

• Clarke wrote, “I’ll be only 102 in 2019, which by then will be no unusual age.” Medical research might very well have been able to allow people to live far beyond age 100.
• Clarke envisioned a commercial moon base, that is, one that was profitable, rather than just a massive drain on the NASA budget. The work on these bases would primarily be done by self-replicating robots. Manufacturing might very well be easier in reduced gravity. We could have done this, though I am not sure that it would have been worth the effort and cost.
• Scientists knew that neural circuits produced effects that could be measured from outside of the skull. Today, this is the whole basis of brain scans. Clarke envisioned that information from such scans could be used to control the movement of, say, an artificial limb. This is now becoming reality, however far-fetched it seemed in 1986.
• Clarke foresaw great changes in education, especially that distance education would begin to replace schools. Course papers would be graded and returned by computer. But he was wrong in saying that this education could consist of a professor lecturing (a hologram professor, no less).
• Clarke predicted that maglev (magnetic levitation) trains would be common—and maybe they could have been, were it not for the self-interest and political power of fossil fuel corporations. He foresaw fusion power, which turned out to be harder to produce than anyone might have guessed.

In some cases, the predictions were almost laughably off target. Most of these had to do with brain technology.

Clarke makes the assumption that everything about our behavior and feelings results from some structural or chemical condition in the brain. True this may be, but Clarke thought that the solutions to all of our mental stresses therefore had straightforward solutions. In 2019, Clarke said, “a mind engineer can look inside your brain and see your insecurities in Technicolor.” He said we would know which drugs were “guaranteed to make your head a nicer place in which to live.” An Oedipus complex could be cured with Oedipills. One pill (mnemosyne) to make you remember, another (nepenthe) to make you forget. Drugs, coupled with the implantation of false memories, can make you forget your miserable past and believe nice, nice things about yourself. Implantation of false memories could, he said, turn bigots into nice people. There would even be a drug (dionysiax) “to shake up a straight-laced libido.” And another drug to eliminate the fear of death once it had become inevitable. At the time, Ecstasy had just been invented, and Clarke wrote about it as if there was no down side to this development. There would be machines to entrain your brain waves to not only eliminate insomnia but also to allow lucid dreaming. In this way, you could go into your own head and purge recurring nightmares. You could even share dreams with a community of other people, including lucid, shared erotic dreams. He thought 2019 would be right in the middle of “the orgasmic age.” (This is not what I expected from Arthur C. Clarke.) These mental experiences, he predicted, would replace religion.

In fact, Clarke speculated that by 2019 the world would be a sexual paradise, without any bad consequences. The reason for this is that most of the bad consequences of uninhibited sex in the twentieth century and, as it turns out, the twenty-first—sexual disease, unintended pregnancy, sexual assault, etc.—resulted from the sex act itself, which by 2019 would be replaced by electrical stimulation of the brain’s pleasure center. If not that, then, for men, a rectal implant that would stimulate penis nerves. I assume Clarke meant that even masturbation would be obsolete by 2019.

I did not make any of these things up.

In the next essay, I will continue the exploration of what Arthur C. Clarke thought the world might be like in 2019.

Why Genesis is Wrong, Even Figuratively, Part Two: Male and Female Created He Them

The second reason that I consider Genesis to be wrong, even when interpreted figuratively, is that Genesis 1 is all about strict and absolute categories. The most popular figurative interpretation of Genesis 1, known as the Framework Hypothesis, explains the days of Genesis as categories for classifying the universe. On the first three “days,” got sets chaos into order; on the second three “days,” he fills them up. Days 1 and 4 are about the heavenly realm: light and darkness made distinct, then filled with sun, moon, and stars. Days 2 and 5 are about the fluid realm: air and sea made distinct, then filled with fishes and birds. Days 3 and 6 are about the solid earth: land and sea made distinct, then land filled with creeping things, one of which was humankind.

This is a nice figure, but we must not take it too seriously. There is no absolute distinction between light and darkness, atmosphere and outer space, land and sea. The world also has dawn and dusk, penumbra, an exosphere that intergrades without boundary into outer space, a world of marshes and estuaries.

Genesis also says that organisms reproduce after their kind. In general, this is true. Species are not simply useful categories of organisms but are realities. Still, the boundaries among species are sometimes indistinct. As a botanist, I will use a plant example. For example, Quercus stellata (post oak) and Quercus macrocarpa (bur oak) are distinct species, but there are a few regions in which they hybridize, producing a hybrid known as Quercus x guadalupensis. The hybrids are rare and, presumably, less specialized than the parents; they probably cannot grow as well in dry as do post oaks, or soil as moist as do bur oaks. Rare though they be, they exist. There are many hybrids between different species of the same genus in plants, and, among orchids, even between different genera.

Genesis 1 also makes an absolute distinction between male and female. This distinction is useless for plants (but Genesis 1 does not apply it to plants). But even in animals, the male-female distinction is imperfect. Whole phyla of animals (for example the phyla that contain snails and earthworms) consist largely of bisexual individuals. In some fish species, individuals may grow up as females then, when they are large enough to be successful fighters, they change into males. Moreover, the natural world contains ambiguity of sexual behavior. Homosexuality is very common in many animal species, where it functions as social bonding (since it obviously has no reproductive function).

The male-female distinction is imperfect in the human species as well. Most individuals are heterosexual males or females. But many humans are gay or lesbian or bisexual. Speaking as a very, very heterosexual male, I admit I cannot understand these people’s feelings, but I acknowledge them and I accept them. I accept their testimony about themselves. They tell me nature has made them so and it is not a choice they made. In particular, there is no small number of people who are physically one gender and psychologically another. Many Native American tribes have long recognized the legitimacy of men who assume female identities: formerly called berdache, this identity is now called “two-spirit.”

There are some people who are born as little girls and then, at puberty, turn into young men. This happens because the gene that produces juvenile testosterone function is blocked, with the result that they develop as little girls. However, their adult testosterone function works fine, and they develop male characteristics at puberty. Of course, they cannot completely turn into men; they retain many feminine characteristics as adult males. The Dominican village in which this commonly occurs refers to them as a third gender: guevedoce, or eggs-at-twelve. A similar phenomenon occurs in Papua New Guinea, where these individuals are called, in pidgin, turnim-men. Nature does this to them, their chromosomes do this to them, and scientists know exactly how.

The absolute categorizations of the universe that are implied in even a figurative reading of Genesis 1 are therefore imperfect. This does not present any great problem unless you are a creationist or a fundamentalist. Creationists insist that “after their kind” means that evolution cannot occur. This is based on taking “after their kind” too seriously. Fundamentalists insist that all humans are either male, or female, or deviants who must be restricted or punished in some way. This is based on taking the phrase “male and female created he them” too seriously. One example of this is a certain state-funded university whose academic vice president rejected the tenure application of a transgender woman on religious grounds. At this point, Genesis 1 becomes an oppressive and oppressing chapter of scripture, even if no attempt is made to force Earth history into a six-day schedule.